July Garden Update

        Aahhh, the garden. To be honest I had very low expectations. In the past, I've only had raised beds with store bought organic compost/soil. When designing this garden, I knew I wanted to try and work with what we had. That meant planting directly into the dirt we have. We ended being able to get some horse manure from someone so we tilled that into the dirt before planting. Mix that with all the heat, humidity and massive amount of rain, and we have a pretty successful (so far) garden. Albeit, very overgrown with weeds...

Romaine Lettuce

   

Beans 

(we will have enough beans to last a lifetime if I can get rid of the japanese bettles)

Green Peppers (getting bigger every day!)

Banana Peppers

Cherry Tomatoes

These are called Summer Sandwich tomatoes. I got the plant from Lowes mainly bc I was curious.

Beefsteak Tomatoes

Cucumbers

I only planted one cucumber plant this year but it's looking like I'll be able to feed an army with them...

Next year I will give the cucumbers more support and space. I used three metal stakes and some fencing for them to climb, but I didn't make it high enough or wide enough. Hopefully what I have for now will still be able to continue to support the plant as it grows and produces.

Potatoes! They're starting to flower. In the future I will build them some sort of support system to keep the leaves off the ground. This year I'm just praying they don't all rot underground.

Carrots. I desperately need to be able to get out here and clean up this bed and thin these out...

Pumpkin Patch...ugh. The grass is so out of control. I'm honestly not sure how to redo this for next year. But for now, as soon as we have a dry day I am going to try and trim the grass around the pumpkin leaves and then cut garden fabric to put on top. It's a Band-Aid, but hopefully and effective one.

How crazy is it that this was just a few weeks ago?!?!?!

Next year -

1. Box in each bed so there's some separation between the plants, and pathways.

2. Possibly expand the width of the entire garden. The alternative to this would be moving the pumpkin patch to a different part of the property.

3. Build stronger supports 

Here's the garden today. It has rained so much our whole property is sloshy. Mowing, weeding, etc is out of the question. I pulled a big weed out of the lettuce bed earlier and unearthed a bunch of roots. The ground is just too soft to be messed with right now.

Another thing I'd love to do is plant flowers the same depth as the arbor. And eventually we will do more permanent fencing. We just left it like this for now to see if this was going to be the size we like.

Well that's it. All of my garden knowledge has come from trial and error and google. I see these GORGEOUS gardens on Pinterest and Instagram and it isn't hard to feel like a failure. BUT, I keep reminding myself that it doesn't have to look beautiful to produce. 💖